NEWS ARCHIVE

IN recent days we have heard stories of a major falling-out within the management structure at British American Racing with the stories suggesting that managing-director Craig Pollock has split up with his partner Julian Jakobi.

JORDAN may have won its first Grand Prix this weekend in Belgium but the team's technical director Gary Anderson will not be staying with the team and the word in the paddock at Spa was that Anderson will shortly begin work as the new technical director of Tom Walkinshaw's Arrows operation.

THE annual musical chairs of Formula 1 engineers continues with rumors that Mike Coughlan, the chief designer of the Arrows team, is planning to leave Tom Walkinshaw's team to take up a new position with the yet-to-be-announced Honda Formula 1 team.

WE believe that Tom Walkinshaw and British American Racing's Craig Pollock are in the process of trying to negotiate a deal which will see Brazilian Pedro Diniz switch from Arrows to BAR as Jacques Villeneuve's team mate.

JUDITH GRIGGS - the Australian who many believe is being groomed as a possible future chief executive of FormulaÊ1ÊHoldings when Bernie Ecclestone decides to retire - is to work for Paddy McNally's Allsport Management in Geneva.

DAMON HILL and Ralf Schumacher took advantage of a mistake by Michael Schumacher in the Belgian GP to score JordanÊGrandÊPrix's first Formula 1 victory in fine style, the pair finishing first and second at Spa. The result puts the team into a fighting fifth in the Constructors' Championship, within reach of both Williams and Benetton.

TOM WALKINSHAW is understood to be moving away from the idea of running with Supertec V10 engines next year, preferring to spend the $23m which is being demanded for the French engines to develop his own promising V10 power units.

HEINZ-HARALD FRENTZEN spent the early part of last week in the hospital in Vienna, Austria, undergoing tests in an attempt to ascertain the cause of the illness which hampered his efforts during the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend.

THE Honda Motor Company is to support a brand new single-seater series in Japan, which is intended to replace the existing Formula Nippon and to be a stepping-stone for Japanese drivers into Formula 1.

NASCAR star Jeff Gordon has confirmed that he did receive several approaches from Formula 1 teams - as we exclusively reported in June - but the stock car racer says that he is not going to leave NASCAR, although he would love to be given the chance to test a Grand Prix car at some point. In addition to Williams we believe that Gordon was offered an F1 drive by the new British American Racing team.

RALF SCHUMACHER has signed a four-year deal with Williams Grand Prix Engineering - if stories in the German press are to be believed. Everyone involved in the negotiations denies that any deal has been done, although they admit that talks are taking place.

WITH attention beginning to turn to the 1999 cars the Formula 1 teams went testing at a variety of different locations last week with some teams in action at Monza and Mugello (which has a similar character to Spa) in Italy; at Magny-Cours in France, at Barcelona in Spain and at Silverstone in England.

THE decision to delay Honda's entry into Grand Prix racing until the year 2000 is inconvenient for the team's rising Japanese star Toranosuke Takagi, who has driven remarkably well this year with Tyrrell, although he has been unable to score any good results because the car is simply not fast enough with a Ford customer engine.

BRITISH AMERICAN RACING went testing last week at the tiny Welsh airfield racing circuit of Pembrey. The aim of the test was to try out a variety of different liveries to see which ones worked best with TV cameras.

THE principal players in the planned Honda Formula 1 team met for a massive 11 hours at Honda's Cricklade factory, near Swindon, England, in the days after the German GP, to make a final decision as to whether or not to go ahead with the plan to enter Grand Prix racing in 1999.

INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY boss Tony George and Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone are entering the final stages of their negotiations to agree a deal which will see Formula 1 cars racing on an infield circuit at Indianapolis in the Spring of 2000.

WHILE British American Racing continues to beat the publicity drum at every available opportunity, there is still one major problem to be overcome before the team is up and running in the form that British American Tobacco expect it to be.

THE hot rumor in Hungary was that Ralf Schumacher has signed some kind of an agreement with WilliamsÊGrandÊPrixÊEngineering, where he will partner Alex Zanardi next season. There are suggestions, however, that Ralf first needs to extract himself from his Jordan contract before he is able to switch to Williams.

ALTHOUGH all the Formula 1 teams have now finally signed the 1998 Concorde Agreement we understand that contrary to earlier reports the final draft of the document has NOT yet been signed by Max Mosley, President of the FIA.

McLAREN, Williams, Jordan and Sauber were in action last week at Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain in very hot conditions, with temperatures around 100-degrees Fahrenheit. This was good preparation for the Hungaroring as temperatures in Budapest are often very high.

STEWART GRAND PRIX had been hoping to continue as the Ford Motor Company's only factory-supported team until the end of the 2000 season, but the team's failure to score any really strong results has prompted Ford executives to take a short-cut to the top and do a deal with Benetton for the 2000 season.

AFTER the excitements of the last couple of weeks on the Formula 1 driver market things have now settled down with announcements expected within the next couple of weeks confirming that Damon Hill will stay with Jordan and that Olivier Panis and Jarno Trulli will continue as team mates at Prost Grand Prix.

THE three FIA stewards at the British Grand Prix - India's Nazir Hoosein, Canada's Roger Peart and Britain's HowardÊLapsley - went before an extraordinary meeting of the FIA World Council in Patis and "voluntarily" handed in the licences which give them the right to be Formula 1 stewards.

GERMAN tiremaker Continental AG says that it is interested in becoming involved in Grand Prix racing in a few years - but may be considering accelerating its plans because of the availability of top teams Williams and Ferrari, which will lose Goodyear tires at the end of this year.

THE FIA International Court of Appeal has rejected McLaren's appeal resulting from the British GP at Silverstone and so Michael Schumacher is confirmed as the winner, despite not being punished for overtaking Alexander Wurz under a yellow flag.

THE FIA World Council added to the confusion over team orders last week by explaining that team orders were not actually banned when it met in March but that it had simply been pointing out that the rules prohibited acts "prejudicial to the interests of any competition".